Cole Canyon students' odyssey continues

Fourth-grader Aidan Maronde didn't know much about the Odyssey of the Mind program before he enrolled in it this year at Cole Canyon Elementary School. Although he thought one thing was for certain.

"My friends kept telling me, 'When you do Odyssey of the Mind your first year, you're not going to make it to state,'" Aidan said.

Those friends were wrong. And the Cole Canyon Elementary School student didn't head to the competition alone. Three teams from his school performed well enough at the Inland Empire Regional Tournament earlier this month to qualify for the state tournament held Saturday at Brentwood Heritage High School in Northern California.

To put the accomplishment in perspective, only two other elementary schools from the Inland Empire Regional, which encompassed schools from San Diego to San Bernardino, sent more than one team to the state tournament -- Washington Charter School of Palm Desert, which had four state qualifiers, and Mission Estancia Elementary School in Carlsbad, which had three.

"We have a great tradition of Odyssey of the Mind here at Cole Canyon," Principal Mike Marble said, noting the school sent a team to the world finals two years ago.

This year's world finals will be May 22-25 at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich.

Odyssey of the Mind is an international educational program that tests the problem-solving skills and creativity of groups of teams that are judged on their ability to conceive, script and stage a skit that deals with a specific problem, or scenario, and their capacity for thinking on their feet in an improvisational exercise called spontaneous.

Teams are judged on both their skit, which is worth up to 250 points, and spontaneous, which is worth a maximum of 100 points.

A total of 19 elementary school teams from the regional contest advanced to the state tournament in five categories;each category is based on a different problem.

Cole Canyon took two of the three qualifying spots in the pet project category, in which teams had to transport the body parts of an animal with three vehicles using different propulsion systems.

Once the animal was delivered, it has to be assembled and perform a trick. For example, depicting a cow jumping over the moon.

Cole Canyon also had the top qualifier in a category called It's How You Look At It, where the skit was centered on the premise that a person can be in one situation in which it is completely out of place, and another situation in which it is completely normal.

Sean Gillam started in the Odyssey Of the Mind program four years ago at Cole Canyon, and has participated every year since. He is now a seventh-grader at Thompson Middle School. Odyssey of the Mind stages competitions for middle school and high school students too.

Gillam cited a dilemma that one of his teams had run up against in creating a vehicle with two transportation devices. The solution they settled on was dropping a scooter engine into a go-cart.

"What I got out of it personally was the teamwork," Sean said. "Before when I did projects, I was more single-minded. I liked to do it my way. From Odyssey, I learned how to work as a group, as a team."

One of the rules of the competition is that the students are required to perform all the work. So while teams have adult coaches -- parents and teachers -- it's the students, and students alone, who have to build sets, paint backdrops and create vehicles.

Chris Schroeder, a coach of one of Cole Canyon's pet project teams, said the kids have to sign a form that explicitly states they accepted no help from adults.

"Everybody on the team thinks a little bit differently," Marble said. "It's not driven by one person. It's not driven by one process. You can see the input and personality from each of the kids on the team."

Marble said that Constance Youens, the retired teacher who oversees the Odyssey of the Mind program at Cole Canyon, has done a good job of training the teachers and parents in the program to remain hands-off, while encouraging the students to seek solutions to the obstacles they encounter.

"They are working the kids' thought processes, keeping it going," he said.

Cole Canyon fifth-grader Sophia D'Santi is on one of the pet project teams that qualified for the state tournament. She said that as the regional tournament approached, the team met every day after school for two hours or more.

Her father, Paul D'Santi, said that at a recent school carnival where the Odyssey of the Mind program had a couple of tables set up to solicit donations, Sophia was more interested in working the fundraising stations than checking out the games and attractions.

"It's kind of exciting watching the kids get involved with it," he said. "Because it is very complex, but they are having a good time with it. It's kind of neat to see their ambition and the camaraderie as they move along. It's a cool program."